The internet has done a variety of things for journalism - things that you know only too well. If you are reading a student's blog on the topic of media I, the author, can safely assume that you are not new to the field of journalism and that you have already processed a good amount of information on the state of the news media and web-based journalism before. There is just so much out there. So much you can go through, so much you can trust. And so much that you can't.
For you to be reading this blog, you probably have an opinion already on what I am going to write about, and for some reason, you think that this student of journalism might have something interesting to say. Something that you would like to read because of the possibility of it adding to your opinion of the news media or in order to gauge a student's opinion on the news media. But you wouldn't trust everything I say, unless you spend a lot of time viewing and cross checking all the links I provide. You may still be unsatisfied.
To get any information on the American news media, a layman would choose a more reliable source, such as Editor and Publisher Magazine or Poynter as first stops. They were probably yours as well.
The internet has complicated things for a reader. Legacy media like ABC News and Washington Post are online, trying to be as interactive as a blog but also as "balanced" as they have aspired to be. The lines between these two entities have been blurred, and unsophisticated consumers of news are hesitant to distinguish the two; they don't know what they can expect from either. They don't know what is trustworthy.
But websites like SpinSpotter.com and NewsTrust.net will change all that. Before you waste your time reading a story, SpinSpotter tells you if you can trust the content or not. NewsTrust aggregates all information it deems reliable, and organizes it based on topics.
Here is how they work.
A toolbar is downloaded onto your browser. As you read an article, the Spinoculars indicator comes on and discovers all the items that illustrate the "spin" in the piece being read.
The system identifies "Spin," based on a set of criteria created by a Journalism Advisory Board. These include, biased sources and over-reliance on press releases.
Evidently, an opinion/editorial story will have the most "red." Consider Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times.
As for the tool's usage, unfortunately there were a variety of websites I visited, that did strike out on a few of the elements my Spinoculars should have had caught on to. Aside from the technical tweaking the tool may need, the tool performed smoothly and was easy to use.
NewsTrust
The objective is to be the last stop for trustworthy news or "quality journalism." Articles are rated by reviewers for fitting the "core principles of journalism," including fairness and transparency.
They call themselves a "guide to good journalism." A large variety of sources of news are reviewed and lists of good stories are populated.
The benefit to the reader is that the website has information on all the major topics in the news. It is strictly an aggregator, but has a variety of stories from both sources in both mainstream media like the New York Times, USA Today, etc., and what it calls the "Independent" media - a host of websites and blogs such as AlterNet - a left wing news webstie, MotherJones and even The Huffington Post.
The difference is that NewsTrust requires the proactive effort of its viewers to grow the number of stories it has whereas SpinSpotter is a tool, applicable to any content page.
Both sites function on one underlying belief: viewers want to be aware of the fact that they are reading biased content.
Consumers of news have gotten critical about the messengers of news they once trusted blindly. To get an accurate account of news today, the coverage of the same story must by viewed in two different websites, in both mainstream media and "independent" media. Neither NewsTrust nor SpinSpotter would work if readers were not proactively concerned about the quality of news.
No matter what your opinion on blogs and amateur journalism is, you need to accept that these new players in the news industry cannot be ignored and that they are here to stay. And they have earned their place. Websites like Drudge Report, Politico and DailyKos have broken stories which would have arguably gone unnoticed (or maybe just unreported) by the traditional media.
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